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Jan. 20, 2006 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:23
January 20, 2006, Friday, Hour #2
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That's right, Johnny Donovan.
And it is Walter E. Williams sitting in for Rush and Rush will be back Monday.
And you can be on with us by calling 800-282-2882.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have a dynamite hour ahead of us.
We have as our guests, Lisa Snell, and she is the director and child welfare and director of education and child welfare program at the Reason Foundation that's based in Los Angeles, California.
Welcome to the show, Lisa.
Hi, Walter.
How are you?
Okay.
Before we get started, tell me some more things about the Reason Foundation.
A lot of people don't know.
Well, the Reason Foundation is basically a nonprofit think tank, and we publish Reason Magazine, which is the fourth largest political magazine in the country that writes about current events and public policy from a free market perspective.
And then we also have a think tank component where we publish studies on different policy areas, mostly with a privatization free market perspective.
And we look at education, environment, transportation, just general government reform policy.
Oh, good, good, good.
Good.
And you're pushing the ideas of liberty.
That's right.
Now, tell me what you do as the director of education.
What are you currently working on?
Well, I guess the biggest thing that I work on, the theme that goes throughout all of the work, is the idea of more competition in education and the idea that kids should have the right of exit to choose the schools that they want and not be mandated to one school based on their neighborhood residence and that the money should actually follow the child to their school.
So the mechanism, whether you're talking about a voucher program or a charter school or a tax credit or a public school choice program, is not necessarily as important as the idea that kids are customers, there should be lots of different kinds of schools that can compete for those kids.
And that, you know, because 99% of resources, public resources, are tied up into a monopoly system of education in our country, you know, there has to be some way to break up that money, to break up those resources, so that that money follows the kids and goes to the kids and their families and not to the institutional structures.
You're absolutely right.
I think that if one can make an argument, and you might concede an argument, that there should be public financing of education, that is, taxpayer financing education, and I'll give that particular argument, although I don't buy it completely.
But there is no argument whatsoever for public production of education.
Exactly.
And it's like while we'll publicly finance F-15 fighters, there's no government F-15 factory.
That is, we let the private sector produce it.
Now, what you're talking about is really an argument that Milton Friedman made back in his book, Capitalism and Freedom, in the 60s.
I mean, I'm sorry, in the 50s, and people thought he was a lunatic.
He was talking about the voucher system, and that's essentially what you're proposing, or a tuition tax credit system.
That's right.
I mean, Milton Friedman just had his 50th anniversary of the idea, and he really is the father of this idea.
But I think since then, on the one hand, we've had many small steps, and we haven't made a lot of progress.
But I think there are now several different financing mechanisms and models and different programs that are in the spirit of Milton Friedman, although they may not always get all the details right.
And we actually have some results from those programs that show in general when schools compete for dollars and for kids, the outcomes are good, better for everyone.
Could you give us some examples of that?
Is that a bad connection we're getting?
Yeah, I can barely hear you now, and I'm getting some kind of feedback on that.
Let us call you back on that, okay?
Folks, we're going to hold off for the interview for a minute.
But let me just talk about a few things about the education system.
And we can kind of think of a kind of imagine that if you had publicly produced food, that is, you know, the stores were owned by the government and the government decides what foods we eat, what quantities we buy it in, et cetera, et cetera.
I doubt whether you'd be as satisfied as we are now with our food delivery in our country.
And then, moreover, what prompted me to call Lisa Snell and talk to her about education was an article that was written by George Will recently in, I think, in one of his columns.
And here's where he starts off.
And I'm going to ask Lisa about this, if we can get her back.
He says that the surest and quickest way to add quality to primary and secondary education would be by not by addition, but by subtraction.
And what does he say?
He says, close all public schools of education.
That is, we would improve education in our country if we could just get rid of schools of education on college campuses.
Why?
Well, it turns out that schools of education represent on any college campus, they represent the academic slums of the campus.
Now, what do I mean by academic slums of the campus?
Well, the students who attend schools of education, that is students who are education majors, they have the lowest SAT scores of any other major.
The professors in these schools, they have the least amount of respectability on campus in terms of having articles published in refereed journals, that is, you know, state-of-the-art articles published.
Now, going back to the students that graduate with degree in hand from schools of education, when they take the Graduate Record Exam, GRE, to get into a graduate school, or when they take the LSAT to get into a law school, or when they take the MCATs to get a medical college admissions test to get into medical school,
graduates of schools of education, that is people who have education degrees, they score the lowest on all these examinations.
And so it's no question whatsoever that they are going to be people who will be most subject to various fads of one kind or another.
We have Lisa back.
I'm sorry for that snafu, Lisa.
Hey, Walter, everything's good now, I think.
Okay, very, very good.
Now, okay, now could you give us, before we parted, before we had that problem, could you give us some, I was asking you to give us some examples of schools that Our voucher or charter versus the outcomes in schools that are public schools.
Right.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I actually have a cover story coming out in the April issue of the magazine that looks at the San Francisco public schools.
And they actually, it's a public school system where they made every public school in the district compete for kids in dollars.
And they have a financing mechanism where the money follows the child.
So every public school has now developed these specialized programs like the arts, math, and science, language immersion, and they're all competing with each other to become the best public schools.
Now, this is by no means a market, and they have all the regulatory constraints.
But it's interesting, San Francisco public schools have become the top performing school district in California, urban school district, and for five years in a row, their academic achievement for every subgroup, but especially African Americans and special education kids, has gone up phenomenally.
And schools that used to be like there's this ranking system in California, 1 through 10, used to be like 1s or 2s, are now 6s and 7s, and schools that used to be 8s are now 10s.
And it's lifted up the whole system just by introducing competition within the public system.
So that's one model.
But then when we look at actual vouchers and tax credits, which of course are much more desirable because they don't have the kind of regulatory constraints and bureaucracy that still infects the San Francisco public schools, so if we look at, for instance, in California, we now have about 500 charter schools.
In Los Angeles Unified School District, which is arguably one of the worst school districts in America, and it's the second largest school district, every charter school in the district is outperforming the public schools with largely low-income minority populations.
And this is just all a result of competition.
It's all because of competition.
And Carolyn Hawksby from Harvard has written a lot about the phenomenon that this lifts all boats.
And in all of these systems, when you get a certain amount of the student population exiting the public schools, the public schools realize that they need to change their practices.
So not only do the kids that get the direct benefit of going to a private school or a charter school benefit, but then the kids whose parents weren't able to use the option or choose also benefit because their schools start responding to those competitive incentives and changing their programs, trying to keep kids from leaving.
Yes, we have to take a break now, but when we come back, I want you to focus on one of the arguments made against vouchers or tuition tax credits, and people say it will lead to the re-segregation racially of schools in our country.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back, ladies and gentlemen.
We have Lisa Snell on with us.
She's the Director of Education and Child Welfare program at the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles.
And we're talking about Education in America.
And I left Lisa with a question that a lot of people will say, well, the voucher system will re-segregate Education in America.
Do you have any data about that?
Well, first of all, you know, there's conflicting goals between integration and positive outcomes for low-income and minority children.
And the DC voucher program just had its first year evaluation, which Jay Green, who is with the Manhattan Institute and the University of Arkansas, just released some data.
And the biggest finding that he had so far from the voucher program in D.C., which is a new program, is that the kids that left the very segregated D.C. public schools actually have gone to more integrated private schools in the District of Columbia.
So in this one case, just this week in the news is the D.C. voucher program, where it has actually helped with the integration problem.
Yes.
And I understand that private schools are more racially heterogeneous than public schools.
That's right.
I mean, on the LA Times front page today is a story about the magnet school program, which is like a choice program within the public schools.
And the reason they developed that program 40 years ago was to help with school integration.
Well, it turns out that these programs have had pretty good outcomes for African American and Hispanic children, but many of these magnet schools are 100% African American.
And, you know, in this article, they interview the principals and the people that are running these programs, and they say that no matter how good the programs are, you know, they can't get parents to voluntarily go into a different neighborhood or go somewhere they don't want to go.
And so there's a lot of charter schools and specialized programming that parents are voluntarily choosing, which may have 100% African American population that have great outcomes or 100% minority population.
You take the seed charter school, which is like a boarding school for the most disadvantaged, kids that are on parole, kids that have not succeeded in any other system.
And it's completely segregated, yet every student that goes through that program is going to a good four-year college.
Yeah, right.
So what is the goal or the outcome?
Is it just integration or is it getting positive outcomes for those children?
Yeah, I agree with you 100%.
I was just bringing up that particular argument because I've always said years ago that I believe that black education, excellence, and education can be achieved without black people having to run out and capture a white kid for their kid to sit beside.
That's right.
That's right.
And, you know, so some programs become more integrated.
You know, some programs, because if you're in the middle of South Central or you have the Watts Charter Learning Center, the idea, you know, that that's an option to the failing public school down the street and the parents are self-selecting that option doesn't mean that you know you're going to be able to get attract kids from you know Manhattan Beach to come to Watts to go to that school.
I mean and that seems to be a very unrealistic goal.
The idea is to have a lot of options for the families that live in Watts.
You're absolutely right.
Let's go to the phones.
A couple people called in.
They'd like to ask some questions.
Let's go to, let's say Mike on a cell phone, you're on with Lisa Snell.
Hi, I think the whole idea of vouchers is a free market fraud.
The money is still coming from the government.
Disinterested parents still have no interest in how they spend those vouchers.
So what's going to end up happening is you're going to end up concentrating all the kids with parents that don't give a damn about their education in the lousy schools because they're not going to switch them around.
They're not going to spend any more time.
And these kids that otherwise may have been exposed to some good teachers and some good peers that would have had a positive influence on them and may have been able to reach them, now they've got no hope at all.
Well, Michael, that isn't what has happened, though.
The exact opposite has happened.
First of all, it's a myth that there's these very apathetic parents.
The demand in these neighborhoods, once they have options, is that even your most apathetic parent is lining up to get these options, and they can never meet the demand.
But the other thing about that is that where they've had intensive competition, so you take places like Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Arizona, the public schools have gotten better, and they've consistently gotten better.
And the kids that are still in the public schools have better programming from that public school than they've ever had before in their life.
And across programs, the data from all different kinds of studies bears that out.
Thanks a lot, Mike, for calling in.
Let's go to Denine in New York City.
Welcome to the show.
We just have a few minutes, Denine.
Hi, Dr. Williams and Lisa.
I wanted to comment on the Florida Supreme Court's recent ruling on January 5th, striking down the Opportunity Scholarship Program.
Yeah.
And it's a very unfortunate situation.
And it seems that the program was in effect since 1999, and it was stimulating the children and increasing competition.
If you can just give me your thoughts on that, I'd appreciate it.
Well, I mean, the rationale that the Supreme Court used is that all schools should be uniform, and that somehow these private schools were not uniform and weren't uniformly high quality.
Well, it begs the question since the schools the kids were leaving were F-rated schools and the lowest performing in the state.
And within the public school district, you know, you have schools that have lots of resources in the sense that they have teachers with lots of, you know, high salaries and then low-income teachers.
And you have huge discrepancies in the quality of public schools.
There's no such thing as a uniform public school system.
So it's a depressing argument, and I think it was very politically motivated.
It surely is.
It's very, very depressing.
That is, the schools that these kids were leaving in their neighborhoods were uniformly bad.
Exactly.
And so they were going to schools where they might not have been uniform, but they were not uniformly bad.
And that's one of the issues.
Lisa, can you hang on after the break just for take a couple more calls?
Sure.
Okay.
Okay.
Folks, we're on with Lisa Snell.
She's the director of education and child welfare at the program at the Hoover Institution.
I'm sorry.
Where I say Hoover Institution, the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles.
And they're doing an excellent job pushing the ideas of vouchers and free markets.
And matter of fact, the idea, before we talked to Lisa, the whole idea of the changes at the TSA to have registered travelers to have this trusted traveler program came from the Reason Foundation by Bob Poole.
We'll be back after this.
We're back, ladies and gentlemen, and we have Lisa Snell.
She's the Director of Education and Child Welfare program at the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles.
Lisa, there are a couple more people that want to talk to you.
But Kit Carson asked me a question, and I think it crops up a lot.
And a lot of people criticize the voucher system.
It says, well, what will happen to special education?
Do you have a response to that?
You know, actually, special education is the world's, I mean, the public school's oldest voucher program in that public schools have outsourced the care of special needs children longer than any other care.
So I'd call it the world's oldest voucher program.
And districts routinely use nonprofit and private providers to serve special education kids.
There's actually now two voucher programs in the country, one in Utah and one in Florida, that are specifically for special education kids.
And the McKay Scholarship Program in Florida serves 20,000 special education kids.
And the money follows them to any private school.
So if they want to go to a school that specializes in dyslexia or they just want to go to a Catholic school with smaller classrooms, that special education actually funding actually follows the child into that school.
And it's been very successful, and the parents are very happy.
And it seems to work out great for special needs children.
So I don't know why their funding can't follow them as well.
That's absolutely right.
And then there's another issue that comes up when people say, let's have a voucher system or tuition tax credit system.
It'll lead to the defunding of public schools.
Have you heard that?
That's right.
And, you know, I mean, the bottom line is that if public schools are failing, I envision a world where hopefully school finance, whether it's public or private, will be based on results.
And in the San Francisco example that I was citing earlier, which is purely public schools competing with one another, they actually have 19 schools right now slated for closure.
And those public schools in San Francisco that have the lowest enrollment and the lowest student achievement are among the 19 schools.
And I think that is the great advantage of charters and vouchers and the funding following the child.
If the school doesn't get better, it should be closed.
And it's not about public or private.
It's about performance for those dollars.
And that would be the great advantage of this type of system.
That is absolutely right.
That's what happens in free markets.
That is, entities that are not satisfying their customers go out of business.
And it makes those resources available for somebody else who would put them to better use.
That's right.
And so I think the D.C. voucher program actually gives the public schools more money that lose voucher students.
And they've found that Jay Green's findings found that it didn't have the usual competition effect.
And that's because the D.C. public schools are actually gaining money when students leave for a voucher and they have nothing to lose.
So while the voucher students are going to better, more integrated schools, the D.C. public schools are feeling no effect of competition.
And I think it's crucial to improve, have competition lift all boats, to have a component that there is some kind of financial sanction when you lose your customers.
Yeah, right, absolutely.
Joe's on his cell phone in St. Louis.
He wants to talk to you.
Welcome to show, Joe.
Thank you.
One of the callers said, you know, if we leave the good kids mixed in with the bad kids, it'll help elevate some of the bad kids or disadvantaged kids, however you want to describe them.
You know what?
It's not the job of my child to elevate anybody else.
And you don't have a right to use my child as an experiment to see if he can elevate other people.
My child has a right to his education.
And if other parents and people don't care, then that's not my responsibility to try to lift them up.
You know, the old saying is, is when you dance with the devil, you don't change the devil, he changes you.
You don't have a right to put my child in an underperforming school simply because he might elevate somebody else.
I mean, I think I don't believe Lisa talked about that, are you?
No, I mean, you're absolutely right.
I mean, the lifting all boats is a byproduct of competition.
You know, you have good cell phone service because some customers care about their service, but every customer doesn't have to call and complain.
You know, companies please their customers, and it only takes a few complaints to make them fix a problem.
So, you know, the fact that there's competition, it's a natural byproduct.
It's not that your child has to be sent to a school to make them better, which I think is what classical desegregation policies, that's the idea.
If we bust a certain amount of kids to the school, it will make everyone better.
So that's the great thing about competition, is you don't have to do anything.
It just happens naturally.
Thanks, Joe.
Let's go to Becky from Michigan.
You're on with Lisa Snell.
Hi, Walter.
Hi.
Michigan is a school of choice state.
And where I live in my county, there are no better schools to send my child to.
They're all mediocre.
And the only thing I can see that's happened is now they spend dollars to advertise.
So what are you saying, Becky?
Well, I'm saying I like the idea, but if there's no, there's really no competition, they have it up the level of competition.
Well, what would happen, Becky, if they started a voucher system where parents actually have the money in their hands, then schools would emerge that are not there now to satisfy the parents.
No, the dollars do follow the students.
Right, but the problem, I think, in Michigan with the Schools of Choice program is that there's no new capacity being built to satisfy the, and there is barriers to entry so that, you know, any startup school cannot receive those dollars.
And, you know, there's other problems too.
I mean, actually, there is some evidence that in some areas the competition effect in Michigan has worked and they have had special programming and changed some of the schools, but it certainly hasn't helped Detroit and it hasn't helped certain public schools.
And thanks a lot, Becky.
Now we can take one more call, can't we?
Okay, let's go to Joe on his cell phone in Toledo, Ohio.
Welcome, Joe.
Hi, Professor Williams.
I really enjoyed the most.
Yeah.
Thank you.
And Lisa, this is a great discussion.
My point is, if we're talking about competition, why are we even allowing the government to stay in the public school market at all?
Why don't we defund the Department of Education?
And that would be probably the biggest key to improving competition and allowing the market to work in education.
Well, Joe, we all have our pipe dreams, but the fact is that the federal government and the local government control 99% of education funding, and they're not going to defund themselves.
So all we can do is to work around the margins to make them more competitive and to have, you know, hopefully more kids exiting the system to these either weather homeschooling, charter schools, you know, vouchers, anywhere we can get it.
But, you know, we can't defund the government.
I mean, there's no political feasibility to do that.
All we can do is work with the system that we have.
And as much as I would love to defund the government, and I think it's an excellent idea, and I'm all for it, I also realize that you have to help the kids that are in horrible failing schools now.
And the only way to do that is to move as many kids out of that system by letting the money follow them any way you can and help the kids that are in those schools now work through the system that we have and that's an unfortunate reality.
That's absolutely right, Joe.
I think it's a pipe dream thinking that we are going to require, we're going to get out of the public financing of education altogether.
I think it would be a wonderful idea for each parent to pay for his own kid's education or be able to get a loan and to get government completely out of it, but we're not going to get there very soon.
And so what we have to say, well, given the current situation, what's the best that we can do?
And I think that a voucher or tuition tax credit system or other proposals that Lisa and others are making to improve education.
We'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back, and we're on with Lisa Snell.
She's the Director of Education and Child Welfare Program at the Reason Foundation.
And Lisa, what's the address for the Reason website?
It's reason.org, which is www.rea son.org.
Okay, it's an excellent website, ladies and gentlemen.
You get a lot on education, privatization, and a number of other issues that are very, very important.
Let's take another phone call, Lisa.
We have Jim on his cell phone in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Welcome to show, Jim.
What I'd like to know is, are there any provisions for homeschool students?
That's one thing that we missed here in Wisconsin when we started the voucher program.
School work.
Well, you know, there could be provisions for homeschool students, and there actually is a couple examples of tax credit programs that give homeschool parents some money.
The homeschool population, though, generally doesn't, they have truly opted out.
And if you really are for the separation of school and state, homeschoolers generally don't want government funding in general, and they don't want to participate in a publicly financed education system, and they've made that choice.
Having said that, there's no reason that there can't be some kind of financial provision within tax credit and voucher programs for homeschoolers.
And my opinion on that, Jim, is that if you can do a job without getting involved with government, let's do it that way.
Let's not allow the tentacles of government to reach in because once they start giving you money, they're going to start dictating the use of the money.
Let's go to Los Angeles David on the self.
Welcome to show, David.
Yes, hello, Lisa.
Hello.
You spoke recently how the schools have done some things for special needs students, but I'd like to see what can be done for gifted students in public schools as they seem to turn their back on the higher proportion of students there.
Right.
I mean, I think competition can only help gifted students.
And unfortunately, because gifted students are in the minority in terms of the student population, most public resources are not directed toward them.
So I think, you know, parental choice, as much as it's necessary for disadvantaged kids, it's also essential for gifted kids.
And, you know, if they could use that funding any way they wanted, they would find the best specialized programs to help their gifted students, and there would be niche schools that would cater to those students.
And, you know, one of the questions, Lisa, that people will raise is that we've had a very good education system in the United States for quite a while.
Let's say it was better.
The public school system was better some years ago.
I'm 70 years old when I was going to school than it is today.
And so what might explain the difference between public schools back in the 30s and 40s, the deterioration quality of the public schools from the 30s and 40s and now?
Well, I mean, that's a complex question, and there's lots of different explanations.
Partly, you know, I mean, my grandparents, who were raised on a farm in Arkansas, they actually only went to about third grade.
And the one difference, I think, is that truly every child with every kind of need, whether special education or low income, is served by the public schools.
But also, I think there has been a disconnect between public education finance and performance that has only gotten worse.
So the more money that has been spent on public education over time, you know, the less results we have gotten for that.
And There has been no kind of correction in terms of public financing.
So legislators keep designating more dollars to schools no matter how bad they perform.
And, you know, the public financing of schools, I think they got a lot less money as a percentage of income 70 years ago, and they were expected to do a lot more.
And I think the unions have a lot to do with that.
The public school establishment, the whole change, the entitlement culture has really changed in public education.
And then there's also an argument that Milton Friedman makes is that there's been considerable consolidation of public schools over the interval.
I think at one time he said, like in the 40s and 50s, there were, I don't know whether this is the correct number, you might be able to help me, like 52,000 school districts in the United States, and today they're around 13,000.
That's right.
So you've had huge, you know, so for instance, LA Unified, you know, close to where I live, has a million students.
It serves a 500-mile population.
You know, it's ridiculous to think that any institution that large that controls the financing for anyone would be very effective.
And Carolyn Hawksby's work has actually shown that where there's a lot more districts within a regional area, there's already a lot more competition because parents can opt in and out of those districts.
That's right.
So yeah, I mean, there has been, there is less competition now than ever before in public education in terms of public schools themselves, districts.
Well, Lisa, thanks for coming on the show.
I think you're doing yeoman's work.
And once again, the Reason website is www.reason.org, and you can go to that site.
Your work is posted on that site, isn't it?
That's right.
Long list of it.
It looks under my name or under education.
Okay, very good.
Thank you very much, Lisa, for joining the show.
Ladies and gentlemen, that was Lisa Snell.
She's the director of education and child welfare at the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles.
And the Reason Foundation is doing a yeoman's job.
And we'll be back with your calls after this.
We're back, ladies and gentlemen.
We're talking about Education America.
And we're not going to change Education America until we accept some uncomfortable facts.
That is, I'm not making a blanket indictment of all teachers, but the quality of people in our public schools leaves a lot to be desired.
For example, look at the expectations of teachers.
Now, there's a test called the California Basic Education Skills Test.
That test is administered to people who are qualifying to be public school teachers.
Let me give you a question from the test to let you know just what the kind of expectations the establishment has.
One of the questions from the California Basic Education Skills Test, sometimes people call it CBES, is seven more than two times a number is equal to 35.
What is that number?
Again, seven more than two times a number is equal to 35.
What is that number?
And they give a multiple choice.
They give, here's the choices that you can make.
42, 28, 29, 14, and 5.
And people who take that test are coming up with the wrong answers for questions like that.
Now, you would expect an eighth or ninth grader to be able to get the answer.
And by the way, for you people out there who went to public school, the correct answer is 14.
So unless we come to grips with the very difficult issue of low-quality teachers teaching our kids, we have to expect a continuance of what we have now.
That is, right in education, where American kids are scoring number 21 in world tests of academic proficiency.
That is, we're spending far more money than, say, Yugoslavia on education, but our kids are doing much, much worse.
So it's not a money issue.
We have to focus on the quality of the people teaching our kids.
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